Distributed-home? Good grief .. Another website about building home entertainment pc’s (HTPC) and Tivo like devices. Distributed home will be different, Distributed-home focuses on what you do  after you’ve plugged in your PVR  and are over the initial wow factor of the built in features, surely these things are capable of more than this?  Yes indeed, take a look at our home/lab system here…

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Ok so you plugged your Tivo, ReplayTV, Windows xp MCE  or homebuilt clone into your network, you can pause live TV, schedule recordings, forward rewind. You might have plugged a DVD-Recorder into the SVIDEO connector or if you have more than one PVR box may be able to do simple room-to-room streaming. You’ve built a simple Home entertainment network or HEN, as I like to call it.

But now what if you want to view that recording in yet another room, say a bedroom or a den. Do you buy an additional pvr box and pay an additional subscription fee. Are there any other options?

There are actually a myriad of possibilities, here is just a partial list of possibilities.

Home networking options:

• You could attach one or more so called thin clients to your network, which could stream video from the pvr or content saved on a pc. In addition to recorded video you could also view your home videos and digital photo albums from any room in your home, your backyard patio or the garage.

• You could build your own PVR using an off-the-shelf Windows XP client  running Beyond TV or Sage TV or go the Linux route using Myth TV.

• You could buy one of the new Windows Media Center PC’s, which should have room-to-room extenders available very soon.

Any of the above methods allow you access to your content from any TV, PC, and PDA on your network. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

A distributed home media network, what I term DHENS takes a cue from distributed computing. DHEN’s in the simplest terms distributes the encoding process; a single PVR may have access to multiple encoders on the same machine or on different machines attached to other TV’s in your Home.

Distributed-home, will try to help you decide just what is the right way for you to build your network.

• Do you need a simple home entertainment networks with a central PVR and several thin clients.

• Do you want to store all the content on a central server, accessed from any location in your home?

• Do you need a more complicated setup with multiple types of thin clients and encoders?

The website you are on will be constantly evolving, initially we will be providing:

• Help and how to guides on building home entertainment networks and connecting components.
• Reviews of what’s currently in the market place.
• An open forum to discuss PVR and connection issues
• An Area for user comments

Going forward we will add:

• An area for uploading photos of registered users htpc and Home entertainment network systems
• User written product reviews.

A few things distributed-homes is not meant for:

• Distributed homes will not be a haven for hackers; we will not endorse or tolerate discussion of hacks to obtain illegal access to subscription services.
• We will not provide means to get by legally imposed copy protection schemes

Distributed-home will strive to be an updated, informed source of information on the changing digital landscape.

Enjoy…